The spacious 8GB Western Digital My Book Duo desktop-class external hard drive comes with two drive assemblies, for either extra room or added safety for your backups.

If you're on the hunt for a basic desktop-class external hard drive with lots of space, then the Western Digital My Book Duo ($449.99) is worth a long look. Most external drives max out at 4TB or 6TB, but the My Book Duo gives you a roomy 8TB of local storage. Music, photo, and video collectors, as well as other digital pack rats, should put this on their short list.

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Design and Features This is one of the most spacious backup drives on the market. The My Book Duo comes formatted for NTFS, with two 4TB drives striped in a RAID 0 array (8 terabytes total space). You can use the included WD utility to reconfigure the drive for RAID 1 mirroring (4 terabytes), or setup as JBOD (just a bunch of disks). Simply put, RAID 0 gives you one 8TB logical drive, JBOD gives you two individual 4TB drives, and RAID 1 gives you one 4TB drive that protects your data in case one physical drive assembly fails. In a RAID 1 configuration, the My Book Duo makes two copies of each file: one on each physical drive assembly. That way if one fails, you still have the second copy to work with. The default RAID 0 setting gives the best performance, so that's how we tested the drive. The drive will work with Macs, so long as you reformat the drive to HFS+. This is a little disappointing, because Seagate drives come with a NTFS driver for the Mac that lets you use them with both Macs and Windows PCs without reformatting (for example, if you need to quickly transfer data between systems in a mixed office).

The chassis is looks similar to the Western Digital My Book Thunderbolt Duo and the Western Digital My Book Studio, aside from the two status LEDs for the dual hard drives. It measures about 6.5 by 4 by 6.25 (HWD) and about 5 pounds, so it's definitely a drive that will stay at your desk, rather than travel with you. The silver-gray chassis has a charcoal-gray inset, where you'll find the drive's power light and RAID status lights. The back panel has a jack for the AC adapter, a USB 3.0 micro-b port for the included USB cable, and two upstream USB 3.0 ports for additional storage and charging your devices like a smartphone or tablet. The dual USB 3.0 ports are unique among external desktop drives. You can connect an additional drive for more storage, plug in a mouse or keyboard, or even charge your phone or tablet using the ports. The hub will help you use the drive with Windows laptops that have only one or two USB ports.

The My Book Duo is also available in a 4TB capacity ($279.99), 6TB capacity ($349.99), and 12TB capacity ($649.99).

If one of the drive assemblies in the enclosure goes bad, an LED light on the front panel will let you know by blinking red. Replacing it is somewhat easy. You just pop the lid, unscrew a bracket, and slide the drive out vertically. Replacement drive assemblies from Western Digital will come with guide pins that make the process easy. Drive arrays with hot-swappable bays, like the LaCie 2big Thunderbolt 2 and Promise Pegasus R4, are easier to replace, though. That said, the LaCie and Promise drives are made for high-availability environments, like engineering and graphics arts studios. The My Book Duo is more of a premium home backup drive.

Software support for the My Book Duo is good (aside from the NTFS driver if you're a Mac user in a mixed Mac/PC environment). The drive comes with Windows Backup and Time Machine support, as well as WD Smartware Pro backup software for timed or continuous file backups. WD Smartware Pro can be linked to a Dropbox account, for cloud-based backup. If you have a need for complete backup for disaster recovery, Western Digital has licensed and branded Acronis True Image WD Edition software, which is available as download for free from Western Digital's support website. Acronis True Image lets you recover everything, including system files, even if your boot drive is completely unreadable. The drive's warranty is good, but not great: two years instead of the three we'd like to see on premium drives like this.

Performance Like the Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive (5TB), our Editors' Choice for desktop-class drives, the My Book Duo had a little trouble running the PCMark 7 drive test. As a backup, we ran the PCMark 5 test, which returned a 6,425 points score, much slower than the 10,796 points garnered by the s Seagate Backup Plus, as well as the 10,561 points of the Buffalo Drivestation DDR 2TB (HD-GD2.0U3).

On our Drag-and-Drop test, the MyBook Duo took 14 seconds to write the 1.2GB test folder, the same result as the Seagate Backup Plus. The Buffalo Drivestation was faster at 12 seconds. The My Book Duo costs about 6 cents per gigabyte at its $450 list price. That's not bad, but it's still two cents per gigabyte more expensive than the Seagate Backup Plus Desktop Drive. The Buffalo Drivestation is a bit pricier, at 7 cents per gigabyte. If you set the drive up for RAID 1, however, the My Book Duo is closer to 11 cents per gigabyte. That figure is actually worth it if you use the drive as a double-fail safe backup.

Ultimately, the Western My Digital Book Duo works best as a backup drive or a repository for large personal media libraries. The 8TB is a lot of space, as is 4TB of doubled data protection. However, if all you need is space, then the Seagate Backup Plus Desktop drive is a better buy, and remains our top pick for desktop-class external hard drives.

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About the Author

Joel Santo Domingo joined PC Magazine in 2000, after 7 years of IT work for companies large and small. His background includes managing mobile, desktop and network infrastructure on both the Macintosh and Windows platforms. Joel is proof that you can escape the retail grind: he wore a yellow polo shirt early in his tech career. Along the way Joel e... See Full Bio

Western Digital My Book Duo (8T...

Western Digital My Book Duo (8TB)

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